US President Obama is a Muslim, right?\u00a0 Raised in Kenya, he\u2019s a Mau Mau sympathizer, and actually not even a US citizen (masterfully covered up I must add).<\/p>\n
Apparently in a new poll, fully 50% of the US population registered with the Republican party believe this ((Joe Klein, \u201cHuckabucking.\u201d\u00a0 Time Magazine, March 11, 2011.\u00a0 Page 15.))\u00a0 I mean, COME ON!!!! Seriously?\u00a0 I remember having an argument with my uncle back in early 2002.\u00a0 Before the US \u201cshocked and awed\u201d Iraq, there was a pretty large part of the US population that was quite sure we would never find WMD\u2019s there.\u00a0 The evidence that Saddam didn\u2019t have WMD\u2019s was actually stronger than the evidence that he did.\u00a0 And listen, I\u2019m sure the other side does it too.\u00a0 I just can\u2019t give you examples because I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve bought into all of the left\u2019s version of crap as a left leaning Democrat.\u00a0 (Please don\u2019t stop reading because of that)\u00a0 At least I\u2019ll admit it.<\/p>\n
We lie.\u00a0 Does not matter what side we\u2019re on.\u00a0 We lie to get what we want.\u00a0 No, don\u2019t call it manipulating the truth.\u00a0 There is no truth in the tools that many politicians use to coerce their voting populace to give them money and votes.<\/p>\n
How many of our organizations do we describe as \u201cpolitical\u201d?\u00a0 We politic to get ahead, to get funding, to get systems, to get employees, to get what we want.\u00a0 Even though we all decry how much we hate it, we all play the game to some degree. In some cases (Mau Mau sympathizer??) we\u2019re just making up crap. \u00a0In other cases, (WMD\u2019s) we might actually believe we have the right information, or have manipulated the data to say what we want it to say.\u00a0 ROI studies are probably the best example.\u00a0 We\u2019re big believers in ROI not just so we can get funding, but so we can get executive sponsorship.<\/p>\n
There is an art to presentation and telling a story.\u00a0 Crafting an effective story is truly the difference between getting change and not getting it, whether it\u2019s a sale, executive sponsorship, funding, etc.\u00a0 At the end of the day, the story is about conveying emotion, not data.\u00a0 We use data as a tool, but we realize that the data can skew the emotion of what we\u2019re trying to change by many degrees.\u00a0 Knowing this, we sometimes\u00a0 manipulate the data.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll be honest in saying that every now and then the data surprises me.\u00a0 I\u2019ll go back to colleagues saying, \u201cis this really telling me what I think it\u2019s telling me?\u201d\u00a0 The result is going back and re-cutting the data several more ways to validate the results, and then, instead of crafting new results and \u201cspinning the message,\u201d going back to the client and admitting, \u201cthis is not what we expected.\u201d<\/p>\n
I recently did a survey with one of my clients which was supposed to tell me what their functional and system weaknesses were.\u00a0 Instead, the data I got back was crap (self described).\u00a0 It took me a couple days and many conversations to realize that the result I wanted (knowing what areas they needed to target to improve service delivery) was never going to materialize.\u00a0 Instead, a completely new and unexpected story started to unfold in front of me.\u00a0 Upon reanalysis and looking at the data in a completely different way, the client had deeper issues than functionality and technology.<\/p>\n
Sometimes we know what we want, we get some data, and it\u2019s just not corroborating our story.\u00a0 But we end up telling our story anyway.\u00a0 But you know what? Somewhere in the data lies a truth which is waiting to be uncovered, and that truth is stronger than any fictional story we want to tell.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard work, and it isn\u2019t always the direction we want to go, but get to the bottom of it.\u00a0 There\u2019s no point being 3 years down the road later and wondering why anyone thought the Mau Mau thing was anywhere close to real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Obama is a Muslim, right?\u00a0 Raised in Kenya, he\u2019s a Mau Mau sympathizer, and actually not even a US citizen (masterfully covered up I must add). Apparently in a new poll, fully 50% of the US population registered…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,27,8,35],"tags":[453,319,318,252],"class_list":["post-1871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-change-management","category-data-metrics","category-strategies","category-tco","tag-change-management","tag-deception","tag-lies","tag-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1871"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1881,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1871\/revisions\/1881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}